Notes: BBFCFM contained a Leave it to Beaver theme tease from Mike and a joke from Fish. The joke basically went: "So there's this guy who's walking down the street, and he sees this dog laying there licking his balls, and he's talking to his friend and says 'boy, I sure wish I could do that,' and the friend says 'don't you think you ought to pet him first?'"

The door guy who worked this show said that this was the MOST packed the Nietzche's had ever been. He said that people started showing up very early and there was a line down the block. My guess is that Nietzche's can hold about 350-400 people at full capacity. Would have been a great place to see them if you could have gotten close to the stage. STILL is a great place to see a show. As per Nietzche's tradition, whenever a band plays there, they sign their names on the ceiling. If you enter the bar and head to the right by the piano and look up you'll see where Phish signed. Well, a good amount of it since they covered some of it up when they installed air conditioning!!! Everyone signed their names, Trey wrote "The Gauze Lives!" and someone (Mike?) drew a little guys head.

The ticket said that the show started at 8, so my friend I showed up at 7 to get a good spot and a pitcher. By 8 the place was still mostly empty, and Phish hit the stage. I remember they played Poor Heart, and then walked forward off the stage in a hurry. I walked over to Mike and said "don't worry, I hear tomorrow night [at UofR] is supposed to be sold out." He replied "yeah, tonight is sold out too."

You see? I thought that the show had started, and that Phish left the stage in disgust because they were bummed no one came. It turns out that that was the soundcheck (I don't remember FB being played as reported above).

Long story short, when they finally hit the stage at around 10:30, I was too exhausted to fully enjoy the show, having already been there about 3.5 hours.

We got there early and grabbed a spot in the little side balcony close to the stage. Primed on the four song demo circulating at the time, they blew me away with how many more fully realized songs there were.

The energy was intense and raw, listening back to the show, it reminds just how strong they were already. Trey and Paige are casually shooting fire from their finger tips, ripping off huge chunks of music, riding the runaway rock train driven by Mike and Fish.

As another long-time fan Michael Egan likes to say, "Right from the beginning, it didn't matter how big the crowd was, they jammed for thousands." Amen.

For the critical listener, there is a little bit of everything to pick on about this show. You've got some abbreviated jams (Squirming Coil), some shaky to weak execution (Hydrogen, Antelope) and some really odd flow (Curtain > Golgi? Paul & Silas > BBFCFM?) There are a few decent moments, such as Hood and BBFCFM (couldn't really hear the joke that Fish told, I'll have to go back and listen again) but there are also some works in progress (Destiny) and several cuts in the recording, too (Funky Bitch, Coil). So I'm going with two stars on this, but I want the record to show that I decided to go two stars BEFORE I heard Trey make a crack about Nebraska ("It's a weird country out there. Until you've been to Nebraska...") Hey, we gave you Kool-Aid and Johnny Carson, damn it!

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